SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/28/2016 8:08 AM
My Worship Time Focus: The Response
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: John 7:6-9
Message of the verses: “6 So Jesus said to them, "My time is
not yet here, but your time is always opportune. 7 “The world cannot hate you,
but it hates Me because I testify of it, that its deeds are evil. 8 “Go up to
the feast yourselves; I do not go up to this feast because My time has not yet
fully come." 9 Having said these things to them, He stayed in Galilee.”
I have to
admit that this section of the seventh chapter of John’s gospel has been
something that I have not understood. In
the first place I know that Jesus is God, and in the second place I know that
God is immutable, for He cannot change His mind about anything, and I guess
that it seems like to me that He did change His mind about going up to
Jerusalem. Another thing that I read
here is that Jesus says in verse eight “I do not go up to this feast” and then
adds “My time has not yet fully come.”
Jesus was
not going to be pressured by what His brothers wanted Him to do, for we read
the following in John 8:29 “"And He who sent Me is with Me; He has not
left Me alone, for I
always do the things that are pleasing to Him."” Now if you are looking to understand the will
of God in your life, look no further than the end of verse twenty-nine where it
says for I always do the
things that are pleasing to Him.”
In doing the will of God Jesus was doing all of the time the things that
are pleasing to Him, and so Jesus was on the divine timetable of God and did
not go up to the feast because of the pressures that His brothers were putting
on Him.
Jesus’
response to His brothers was similar to the one that He gave to His mother in
the second chapter of John were He said to her “My hour has not yet come.” In the same way here He rejects pressure from
His earthly family in order to reveal Himself prematurely. Jesus would not manifest Himself before the
right time, which was the time His Father had chosen for Him to manifest
Himself.
It was a
long time ago that I listened to a sermon by Hal Lindsey on the 7th
chapter of John, which I may be getting ahead of myself here, but when you
think about Jesus manifesting Himself to let people in Jerusalem know that He
was the promised Messiah that would not come fully until the following
Passover, however my memory of the sermon tells me that when Jesus did what He
did, which comes later on in this chapter, He was manifesting Himself as the
chosen Messiah. “37 Now on the last day,
the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, "If anyone
is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. 38 “He who believes in Me, as the
Scripture said, ’From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water’”
(John 7:37-38).” These are the verses
that I remember from that sermon and what Jesus does here is only suppose to be
done by the Messiah, and that is all that I remember, but I listened to that
sermon around 40 years ago so my memory is not the best.
Now Jesus
had said to His brothers that His time had not yet come, but their time was
always opportune. Now as mentioned in an
earlier SD James, and Jude, Jesus’ brothers would come to believe in Jesus in
the time that God appointed for them to believe and they would do the things that
God had planned for them, as James was the leader of the Jerusalem church and
wrote the book of James, and Jude would write the book of Jude. I believe his name was Judas, but no one
wants to have that name after what Judas did to Jesus in betraying Him. Unlike Jesus they would not be putting their
life on the line for people in Jerusalem wanted to kill Jesus and would
eventually do so, but the brothers did not have that kind of pressure on
themselves.
John
MacArthur writes “Because the time was not yet right, Jesus refused His brother’s
request, telling them ‘God up to the feast yourselves.’ The Lord, for the reasons already noted,
chose not to go with them in what would have probably been a large caravan of
people (cf. Luke 2:44). Such a public
journey would have risked another attempt to make Him king by force (as in
6:14-15), or perhaps have triggered a premature triumphal entry. Either might have sparked a confrontation
with the Jewish authorities, resulting in Jesus’ death before the proper time,
which was to be precisely at Passover.
The Greek
manuscripts are about evenly divided between the reading ouk (‘not’) and oupo (‘not
yet’ cf. the NIV). Ouk is most likely the correct reading, since it is unlikely that
anyone would replace oupo with ouk, thereby introducing a seeming
contradiction into the text (cf. v. 10).
On the other hand, there is an obvious reason for scribes to have
replaced ouk with oupo, since doing so removes that
apparent contradiction with verse 10. In
either case, however, the Lord’s meaning is clear. He was not saying that He would not attend
the feast at all, but that He would not go with his brothers in the manner they
expected. Nor would He allow the Jewish
leaders to take His life ‘because’ His ‘time’ had ‘not yet fully come.’ When Jesus did lay down His life, six months
later, it would be at the very moment God had predetermined (cf. v. 30;
8:20). Thus, ‘having said these things
to ‘His brothers, ‘He stayed in Galilee’ for a little while.”
Spiritual meaning for my life today: I am thankful that I understand this section
a lot better.
My Steps of Faith for
Today: Trust the Lord to help me
understand the difficult things from His Word.
Answer to yesterday’s Bible question: “Saul” (1 Samuel 28:5-8).
Today’s Bible question:
“Which country had her civil and religious institutions already formed
prior to having a land in which to occupy?”
Answer in our next SD.
4/28/2016 8:59 AM
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